Ficciones

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What could be said about a book which is in itself many books in a book or many authors in one, for are you capable enough to said anything? Several people count the same quantity come to the same result is an example of association of ideas or of memorization, for subject knowledge is one and eternal there. For anyone likewise less learned than Borges I can attest that taking this approach still provides for an engaging read and is not necessarily the easy way out.

But all the stories are common in a sense that we may find an existential angst in all of them wherein either characters or narrators or the story itself struggles to define its existence in the unique world of Borges. My brain cells concluded that, although some of the allusions are obscure, this tale is far more readily grasped than the first one. Only a few pages into the first story it dawned on me that reading Ficciones would either be a start-and-stop marathon bogged down by frequent trips to Google, or a semi-blindfolded adventure plagued by missed understandings. La impresión que aquella lectura causó en mí aún perdura: asombro, perplejidad, afán de saber, felicidad.My question was soon answered by a side-by-side comparison of a sample of each author’s Don Quixote: they are verbally identical. Thirteen stories from Ficciones were first published by New Directions in the English-language anthology Labyrinths (1962). Quizá me engañen la vejez y el temor, pero sospecho que la especie humana - la única - está por extinguirse y que la Biblioteca perdurará: iluminada, solitaria, infinita, perfectamente inmóvil, armada de volúmenes preciosos, inútil, incorruptible, secreta.

Esto, sin embargo, no es algo extraño que suceda ante una recopilación donde habrá cuentos que se convertirán en tus favoritos, y otros que no serán para nada de tu agrado. I read and then reread several of these stories (some of them for a third time) while I was writing my final review for Fantasy Literature, and they keep impressing me more . Dividido en dos libros menores “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” de 1941 y “Artificios” de 1944 este volumen atesora el mejor cuento de Borges, “El sur”, reconocido por él mismo, aunque los demás no le van en zaga por el asombroso trabajo de arquitectura y relojería con que están construidos. Yes, with Audible now making thousands of books available to be read to people, a blind reader has not completely lost the way to their magical escape tunnels to other worlds. But just when I might abandon a story in confusion (as you might abandon this review), Borges offers an axiom that has the effect of a strong coffee, setting me back on solid ground, able to pay complete attention and avoid being slapped in the face by any further red herrings: destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction.There have been ingenious authors in past too but it had taken them hundreds of pages and the invention of an entirely new language to communicate what Borges has done in sparingly three or four pages. In "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", he indirectly suggests that a librarian is even holier than a saint. These questions tremble our shallow buildings of self- appeasing knowledge and send great discomfort for us to realize that we have absolutely no idea about literature, for our mind has been tied to the strings of dogmas, references (for as human beings we need them) which we have been telling ourselves since the very inception of literature. Therefore, on Tlön the phrase “the moon rose over the sea” would be written “upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling,” or simply “upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.